


Anakreons Grab

by billspilledquill



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, Historical RPF
Genre: First Meetings, Gen, M/M, Stream of Consciousness, catch the elisabeth references and i will love you forever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-27 06:36:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17761670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/billspilledquill/pseuds/billspilledquill
Summary: It’s with the promise of immortality when he writes his first letter to Goethe.





	Anakreons Grab

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fanpersoningfox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fanpersoningfox/gifts).



> A huge thanks to Oxalis who’s been a primary source of inspiration for me to get back to these old men again, and of course, to fanpersoningfox, who has gifted me that lovely English translation. Been trying a way to thank you! I hope this is okay.

 

 

 _Wo_ _die_ _Rose_ _hier_ _blüht_ , _wo_ _Reben_ _um_ _Lorbeer_ _sich_ _schlingen_. 

 _Wo_ _das_ _Turtelchen_ _lockt_ , _wo_ _sich_ _das_ _Grillchen_ ergetzt, 

 _Welch_ _ein_ _Grab_ _ist_ _hier_ , _das_ _alle_ _Götter_ _mit_ _Leben_  

 _Schön_ _bepflanzt_ _und_ _geziert?_ _Es_ _ist_ _Anakreons_ _Ruh_. 

 _Frühling_ , _Sommer_ _und_ _Herbst_ _genoß_ _der_ _glückliche_ _Dichter_ ; 

 _Vor_ _dem_ _Winter_ _hat_ _ihn_ _endlich_ _der_ _Hügel_ _geschützt_. 

 

 _ **zwei**_

 

He asks: “Do you think the moon is as big as the stars?”

Schiller doesn’t like that smile. He decides, almost by some unconscious tread of thought, that he hates the man.

There’s something wrong about hatred, he thinks. Just like he hated the duke during his stay at Karlsschule; it’s not toward an identity, but to everything else that made it so. He hated him as much as he loved him. It’s the school, then it’s the sky and the people gathered around the house. Hatred without love is conspicuous, and it never happens in this day and age.

Goethe is of this age: arrogant, famous, and loved. By him. By everyone that can read.

He hates it. 

The man still waits, his smile turning into something more real, more bored. Schiller’s hands feel warm. A mild, if not impatient frown settles between Goethe’s brows. 

“I’d like to think the great dramatist of our time would have more interesting things to say,” Goethe adds lightly, “words, for example.”

He can’t answer that, nor could he answer it. His tongue caught in his mouth; he felt like covering his face. 

Then the click-a-clack of heels go forth; Goethe walks away from him as silently as he has let himself to be in his company. Goethe and his fake, cordial smile. Goethe and his thinning hair and frowns.

(Goethe and his eyes when they got caught in the moon, like water and pebbles, smooth and clean, like rivers.)

He buries his face in his hands. A cough escapes him, and many more ensued, burning the cold winter air; like petals of petunias.

 

 _ **drei**_  

 

They somehow meet again. Living in Weimar makes it so, he thinks. It’s so near. I am too near. It’s almost human nature to be attracted to Goethe, he believes sincerely. It is in our blood.

Like: Goethe’s eyes are brown and bright and telling him things. 

“The people take the torches on the streets— while kings, like Prometheus, stole the fire,” Schiller says, feeling intoxicated by that, everything else Goethe is. “The French is going to burn themselves if they go too far.”

“Prometheus stole the fire for the mankind,” Goethe replies with an Olympian tone. “Perhaps Icarus is a better comparison, won’t you say?”

Schiller lets his shoulders relax. He sighs contently; grins without thinking.

“Yes,” he answers, “but don’t you think that the people is monarch in spirit?” 

But Goethe isn’t looking at him now. Almost by instinct, the same instinct that prompt him to hate him, he finds himself leaning forward. Goethe is looking at a plant, a smile on his face.

“You speak true,” he says after awhile. Schiller finds himself holding to his every words the way his lungs scraphis every breath away like a poor beggar in the street. He represses his need to cough. “But what can be truly beautiful in politics? Especially French,” he laughs. “Not that I mind French plants or women.”

Schiller’s heart hurts. It’s the heat. “What about plants?”

And that eyes again. He tries to focus his eyes on the green wallpaper behind instead. “Let me show you.” 

The plant smells like woods and poppies, and it is as red as blood.

 

 _**sieben** _

 

If he can choose between health and writing, he would choose Goethe.

“You’re poetry,” he blurts out one day, drown in some nameless drink and sleeves stained with ink. He repeats it, just to make sure.

Goethe looks up from his readings; his small glasses slipping from his nose. He throws him an even stare, then resumes to his book.

“If I am poetry,” Goethe answers another day, when the sun is high in the sky and painting his figure wide, “then you’re language.”

“What?”

Brown, yellow, the sun has colored him gold. In a moment of weakness, he admits that the man looks like a painting. “I live for it,” he explains. “As it is life itself.”

Schiller had a cough fit, after that. The sun was too warm.

 

 _**vier** _

 

Goethe likes plants.

He likes them, and likes to talk about them. He speaks of colors, of species, of _callistephus hortensis_ and _ageratum houstonianum_. He speaks with such ardor; a preacher without religion, a politician without wars to wage.

Goethe likes plants, he muses. He catches the notebook when Goethe’s words are filling the room, the words scrambling over to get free. Clean, elegant hand, with the ‘o’s being tilted right and left like a drawl, like wings.

Goethe likes plants, and he would ask: “Do you?”

And he would say, with the same proud voice, his eyes locked in his: “I do. Very much.” 

 

 _**fünf** _

 

They know each other, him and Goethe.

(He can’t think of him as Johann. It’s such a common name, associated with a common face. But Goethe cannot be other than Goethe with an uneven upper lip, Goethe with a quill and ink, and Goethe with eyes telling him things. They have always been telling him things.)

They have known each other long before their first meeting, before that, before everything else, they have known each other’s books. Books that will be known for years, lasting longer than his lungs and Goethe’s green wallpaper. It’s almost with a frantic certainty that he urges him to work, to write, to leave whatever trace he can before he goes away. To live once, he thinks, is not enough for him.

It’s with the promise of immortality that he writes his first letter to Goethe. 

 

 _**sechs** _

 

The coughs are a continuum. A circle from which he resides in the middle of. Sometimes he would fancy that they are signs that his mental work has been so good that he must have his physical health taken away from him.

But the world has never worked like that. Schiller has always been sick. It’s winter again. A year has passed. The world turns around and around. Schiller coughs in Jena, in the center of the world.

“If I can,” he says to Goethe when they were resuming their Tuesday walk back home. “I’d like to have a choice.”

“It hardly matters,” he replies. “What’s done is done.”

Schiller quietly stares at the snow falling on the tip of Goethe’s nose. “I’d peg you more as Macbeth than his wife.”

Goethe arches an eyebrow at that. He looks amused. “So what,” he presses, “if you can choose from your illness and your _Buchstabe_ , what would you do?” 

And in that winter day full of people, mud, and horse shit, Schiller somehow knows, that if he liked himself brave and fearless, he wouldn’t like himself at all.

“It’s a secret,” he says, his voice quivering after a cough fits. “Allow it to be the only secret I keep from you.”

The snow on his friend’s nose melts. It drips down his face, as if Goethe is melting from the sun.

 

 **_acht_ **

 

He is sick.

He has always been sick. It’s not a problem. The problem is that he cannot be sick for too long. It gives him the illusion that he will die.

Before he was trapped in bed like ropes attached to the bedpost, he would often laugh with Goethe about it. He would say: “Imagine dying. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to simply imagine it with your eyes closed? A man, dressed in black, a kiss to soothe your soul only to claim it afterwards— wouldn’t it be better for us to be taken away by him than by illness? I would, for instance,” he said, “give my soul to him willingly.”

It was one of the discussion in many when Goethe was writing Faust. It was one of the times when Schiller was distracted by the stretch of his friend’s sleeves. One of those moments where he would think about death and Goethe at the same time. They never seem to be apart, nowadays.

He doesn’t remember very well what Goethe has replied. His mind is feverish, and he cannot breathe. It has happened before. It happens, but it hardly matters, now.

He thinks, he still do, that he will let him kiss him. He wonders what death looks like. White and pale as ghost, of woman shape, mad Ophelia—

He screams, or at least, he thinks so. His heart would like to remind him that he is still alive by quenching his arteries with a crushing force. His vision colors. It hurts. It hurts so bad. He sees him, oh god, he sees him. He can’t help but smile softly, his heart throbbing; filling it with something else than pain.

He sees.

“I would,” he thinks he says. “Take me.”

And death says—

 

 _**zehn** _

 

He knows how death works. Goethe lives on. That’s how it works.

He also knows that Goethe will live on forever: that doesn’t work. But it will, for him. He knows, Goethe and Caroline, how they would weave in the fabrics of times, and they will, like legends, only be a piece of how they were. 

If that is life— then it will continue blossoming like pear trees, as beautiful and as unchanging as the summer behind them. This is how plants work: around and around and around.

He suddenly remembers, what he has replied. Goethe with his warm and sincere eyes, glistening with defiance like the first time they met.

And Goethe said—

 

 _**neun** _

 

“If you die,” he says, “then I will die with you.”

Schiller stretches his arms, and kisses him.

He understands. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_**eins** _

 

Picture this: Schiller. Young, bright-eyed, almost-poet Schiller. Then Goethe. Solemn-eyes, already-poet Goethe.

Schiller struggles in his speech. It’s rare that happens. Goethe waits, his heels hitting the floor lightly as time goes by. That, though, happens all the time.

Goethe smiles at that, thinking about early pines in February snow. How alive, how alive. The boy smells like mint and grass after rain.

The boy tells him his name, and some play he has read or watched before resurfaced in his mind. He steps back a little.

If he is life, he thinks, then he must be death too. One cannot have two of this. A volatile, combustible thing—

With that thought cleared, he smiles politely, his hands behind his back, and quietly waits for a moment to excuse himself and join a fairer company. 

Goethe doesn’t like the smile the boy gives back; he hates it, actually.

He says: “The stars are bigger. Your eyes are just too much on the moon.” 

He smiles; and that is the answer. 

 

 


End file.
